CZ predicts millions of AI agents will soon transact on our behalf, booking hotels and making micropayments. Traditional banking systems cannot handle this volume, speed, or the KYC requirements for non-human entities, making crypto the only viable payment rail for the agent economy.
Stablecoins are better suited for AI agent payments than credit cards. They mitigate the security risk of sharing card details and enable the programmatic creation of countless wallets for agent swarms. This allows for a future where every API call could be a micro-transaction paid with stablecoins.
The internet was designed for human interaction, actively discouraging bots. The next evolution will reverse this, with AI agents becoming the primary users. This requires re-architecting everything from user interfaces to business models, with crypto likely serving as the native payment rail for these autonomous agents.
As AI agents become sophisticated, they'll need to pay for services. Traditional banking is too slow and fragmented for them. Crypto, as the internet's native money, provides the instant, global, low-fee rails for AI agents to transact with each other and with web services, creating a major new use case.
To enable agentic e-commerce while mitigating risk, major card networks are exploring how to issue credit cards directly to AI agents. These cards would have built-in limitations, such as spending caps (e.g., $200), allowing agents to execute purchases autonomously within safe financial guardrails.
As anonymous AI agents proliferate globally, traditional KYC and national legal systems become inadequate. It will be impossible to know who or what is behind an agent, creating a need for a new global, trustless infrastructure for agent identity verification and cross-border dispute resolution to prevent abuse by bad actors.
The next phase of AI will involve autonomous agents communicating and transacting with each other online. This requires a strategic shift in marketing, sales, and e-commerce away from purely human-centric interaction models toward agent-to-agent commerce.
The primary interface for services is shifting from websites to conversational AI agents. Users form personal preferences and history with their chosen AI (e.g., ChatGPT) and will expect to perform tasks like opening a bank account through that trusted agent, forcing companies to create a great "Agent Experience."
The financial system is unprepared for the coming wave of AI agents. These agents will perform tasks and require payment, creating trillions of micropayments. Current infrastructure from Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard cannot handle this volume, creating a massive opportunity for new protocols to facilitate the 'agent economy'.
For AI agents to be truly autonomous and valuable, they must participate in the economy. Traditional finance is built for humans. Crypto provides the missing infrastructure: internet-native money, a way for AI to have a verifiable identity, and a trustless system for proving provenance, making it the essential economic network for AI.
The future of AI is not just humans talking to AI, but a world where personal agents communicate directly with business agents (e.g., your agent negotiating a loan with a bank's agent). This will necessitate new communication protocols and guardrails, creating a societal transformation comparable to the early internet.